Take one moment to think about a typical Christian and her "answered prayers." For example, there is a Christian housewife in Pasadena who firmly believes that God answered her prayer this morning to remove the mustard stain from her favorite blouse. She prayed to God to help remove the stain, and after she washed it the stain was gone. Praise Jesus!

There are tens of millions of true believers in the United States who know that God is personally helping them each day with their trivial prayers. They believe that they have a personal relationship with God, that God hears their prayers each day, and that God has time to reach down and remove the mustard molecules one by one. They believe it with all of their hearts.

It makes you wonder: If God has the time and the will to answer these trivial prayers, manipulating the mustard molecules in response to a housewife's prayer, then why is God ignoring the big, important prayers? For example, why isn't he answering the prayers of the billions of people on this planet who are living in stark, abject poverty? It is when you think about this simple question that you realize how imaginary God is and how delusional and completely self-centered Christians can be.

One obvious question that any rational person would ask is this: If an all-powerful god is answering the housewife's prayer, why does she need to wash the shirt? Why not hang the stained, wrinkled shirt in the closet and pray for God to clean and press it there? An all-powerful God could just as easily remove the stain in the closet as he can in the washing machine.

The second obvious question is this: If God is removing the stain, then why doesn't our housewife pray for poverty to dissappear too? Why doesn't she watch tomorrow as the world magically transforms itself into a poverty-free utopia, in the same way that her blouse became mustard-free? Answer: because God is imaginary.